Re: [ovirt-devel] [VDSM] Correct implementation of virt-sysprep job

Adam,

Just out of curiosity: when you write "v2v has promised" - what exactly do you mean? the tool? Richard Jones (the maintainer of virt-v2v)? Shahar and I that implemented the integration with virt-v2v? I'm not aware of such a promise by any of these options :)

Anyway, let's say that you were given such a promise by someone and thus consider that mechanism to be deprecated - it doesn't really matter.

The current implementation doesn't well fit to this flow (it requires per-volume job, it creates leases that are not needed for template's disks, ...) and with the "next-gen API" with proper support for virt flows not even being discussed with us (and iiuc also not with the infra team) yet, I don't understand what do you suggest except for some strong, though irrelevant, statements.

I suggest loud and clear to reuse (not to add dependencies, not to enhance, ..) an existing mechanism for a very similar flow of virt-v2v that works well and simple.

Do you "promise" to implement your "next gen API" for 4.1 as an alternative?

On Tue, Dec 6, 2016 at 5:04 PM, Adam Litke <alitke(a)redhat.com&gt; wrote: On 05/12/16 11:17 +0200, Arik Hadas wrote: On Mon, Dec 5, 2016 at 10:05 AM, Nir Soffer <nsoffer(a)redhat.com&gt; wrote:    On Sun, Dec 4, 2016 at 8:50 PM, Shmuel Melamud <smelamud(a)redhat.com&gt; wrote:    >    > Hi!    >    > I'm currently working on integration of virt-sysprep into oVirt.    >    > Usually, if user creates a template from a regular VM, and then creates    new VMs from this template, these new VMs inherit all configuration of the    original VM, including SSH keys, UDEV rules, MAC addresses, system ID,    hostname etc. It is unfortunate, because you cannot have two network    devices with the same MAC address in the same network, for example.    >    > To avoid this, user must clean all machine-specific configuration from    the original VM before creating a template from it. You can do this    manually, but there is virt-sysprep utility that does this automatically.    >    > Ideally, virt-sysprep should be seamlessly integrated into template    creation process. But the first step is to create a simple button: user    selects a VM, clicks the button and oVirt executes virt-sysprep on the VM.    >    > virt-sysprep works directly on VM's filesystem. It accepts list of all    disks of the VM as parameters:    >    > virt-sysprep -a disk1.img -a disk2.img -a disk3.img    >    > The architecture is as follows: command on the Engine side runs a job on    VDSM side and tracks its success/failure. The job on VDSM side runs    virt-sysprep.    >    > The question is how to implement the job correctly?    >    > I thought about using storage jobs, but they are designed to work only    with a single volume, correct?    New storage verbs are volume based. This make it easy to manage    them on the engine side, and will allow parallelizing volume operations    on single or multiple hosts.    A storage volume job is using sanlock lease on the modified volume    and volume generation number. If a host running pending jobs becomes    non-responsive and cannot be fenced, we can detect the state of    the job, fence the job, and start the job on another host.    In the SPM task, if a host becomes non-responsive and cannot be    fenced, the whole setup is stuck, there is no way to perform any    storage operation.      > Is is possible to use them with operation that is performed on multiple    volumes?    > Or, alternatively, is it possible to use some kind of 'VM jobs' - that    work on VM at whole?    We can do:    1. Add jobs with multiple volumes leases - can make error handling very        complex. How do tell a job state if you have multiple leases? which        volume generation you use?    2. Use volume job using one of the volumes (the boot volume?). This does        not protect the other volumes from modification but engine is    responsible        for this.    3. Use new "vm jobs", using a vm lease (should be available this week    on master).        This protects a vm during sysprep from starting the vm.        We still need a generation to detect the job state, I think we can    use the sanlock        lease generation for this.    I like the last option since sysprep is much like running a vm.      > How v2v solves this problem?    It does not.    v2v predates storage volume jobs. It does not use volume leases and    generation    and does have any way to recover if a host running v2v becomes    non-responsive    and cannot be fenced.    It also does not use the jobs framework and does not use a thread pool for    v2v jobs, so it has no limit on the number of storage operations on a host.   Right, but let's be fair and present the benefits of v2v-jobs as well: 1. it is the simplest "infrastructure" in terms of LOC It is also deprecated.  V2V has promised to adopt the richer Host Jobs API in the future. 2. it is the most efficient mechanism in terms of interactions between the engine and VDSM (it doesn't require new verbs/call, the data is attached to VdsStats; probably the easiest mechanism to convert to events) Engine is already polling the host jobs API so I am not sure I agree with you here. 3. it is the most efficient implementation in terms of interaction with the database (no date is persisted into the database, no polling is done) Again, we're already using the Host Jobs API.  We'll gain efficiency by migrating away from the old v2v API and having a single, unified approach (Host Jobs). Currently we have 3 mechanisms to report jobs: 1. VM jobs - that is currently used for live-merge. This requires the VM entity to exist in VDSM, thus not suitable for virt-sysprep. Correct, not appropriate for this application. 2. storage jobs - complicated infrastructure, targeted for recovering from failures to maintain storage consistency. Many of the things this infrastructure knows to handle is irrelevant for virt-sysprep flow, and the fact that virt-sysprep is invoked on VM rather than particular disk makes it less suitable. These are more appropriately called HostJobs and the have the following semantics: - They represent an external process running on a single host - They are not persisted.  If the host or vdsm restarts, the job is   aborted - They operate on entities.  Currently storage is the first adopter   of the infrastructure but virt was going to adopt these for the   next-gen API.  Entities can be volumes, storage domains, vms,   network interfaces, etc. - Job status and progress is reported by the Host Jobs API.  If a job   is not present, then the underlying entitie(s) must be polled by   engine to determine the actual state. 3. V2V jobs - no mechanism is provided to resume failed jobs, no leases, etc This is the old infra upon which Host Jobs are built.  v2v has promised to move to Host Jobs in the future so we should not add new dependencies to this code. I have some arguments for using V2V-like jobs [1]: 1. creating template from vm is rarely done - if host goes unresponsive or any other failure is detected we can just remove the template and report the error We can chose this error handling with Host Jobs as well. 2. the phase of virt-sysprep is, unlike typical storage operation, short - reducing the risk of failures during the process  Reduced risk of failures is never an excuse to have lax error handling.  The storage flavored host jobs provide tons of utilities for making error handling standardized, easy to implement, and correct. 3. during the operation the VM is down - by locking the VM/template and its disks on the engine side, we render leases-like mechanism redundant Eventually we want to protect all operations on storage with sanlock leases.  This is safer and allows for a more distributed approach to management.  Again, the use of leases correctly in host jobs requires about 5 lines of code.  The benefits of standardization far outweigh any perceived simplification resulting from omitting it. 4. in the worst case - the disk will not be corrupted (only some of the data might be removed). Again, the way engine chooses to handle job failures is independent of the mechanism.  Let's separate that from this discussion. So I think that the mechanism for storage jobs is an over-kill for this case. We can keep it simple by generalise the V2V-job for other virt-tools jobs, like virt-sysprep. I think we ought to standardize on the Host Jobs framework where we can collaborate on unit tests, standardized locking and error handling, abort logic, etc.  When v2v moves to host jobs then we will have a unified method of handling ephemeral jobs that are tied to entities. -- Adam Litke